MUSICIAN’S RESCUE KIT - Earning Online Income As A Musician In Times Of COVID-19 and Beyond By Scott Bradlee www.patreon.com/tourbusuniversity
FOREWORD
I wanted to write this guide for all my fellow musicians out there during this crazy, gig- less time. My own act, Postmodern Jukebox, was one of the first acts to pull a national tour off the road when the Coronavirus began circulating in the United States, and since then, the threat that it has posed to the concert industry has become quite apparent. In reality, the music industry is likely to be one of the last industries to return to normalcy; after all, we’re an industry that is primarily built on getting groups of people together in a room. This is really bad news for all of us that make the majority of our income from performing live — whether it’s as a drummer in a jazz trio, an actor in a Broadway show, a DJ playing nightclubs, a headliner on a concert tour, and everything in between. The good news is that it’s entirely possible to make a great living from music online. In this guide, I’m going to share the system that I use, with a few updates for 2020.
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS TO EARN MONEY ONLINE AS A MUSICIAN
For the sake of this guide, I’m going to assume some minimum requirements on your part: 1) You’ve already put in the work as a musician, and already have at least a couple fans. Having more fans just means you’re that much closer to your goal of making a living from music. 2) You have some way of recording yourself digitally — whether it’s on a computer with Garageband and a cheap microphone, or something more sophisticated.
NOTE: If you don’t have a way of recording yourself, you need to get one. A USB mic runs around $100, Garageband already comes with Macs, and I’m sure there’s a free option for PCs, as well. That’s really all you need nowadays; having pristine sound quality is not as important as it used to be, because most people are going to listen to music on their phones anyway (welcome to the future!).
THE GAMEPLAN: BE YOUR OWN RECORD LABEL
This is the overall gameplan: you are going to think of yourself as your own record label, and do everything that a record label does, only on a micro scale. We know record labels know how to make a profit!
So, what do record labels traditionally do?
• Cover recording and manufacturing costs for artists • Provide worldwide distribution • Assist with marketing and publicity • Sometimes assist with touring 2020 may be a real bummer of a year, but the good news is that we are living in an era where labels are no longer the gatekeepers of the music industry, and the tools that labels have historically used to market music are largely available for a low cost to everyone in the world. So, to act as our own personal record label, we are going to take these four things and find a free, internet-based replacement for each of them. Think of this as our “21st Century Record Label Toolkit.”
STEP 1: CROWDFUND
First, we need a way to cover recording and manufacturing costs. Lucky for you, if you’ve made it this far, you already own the recording equipment. And since we’re selling music online, we don’t need to pay to manufacture anything like CDs. But we’re still going to raise some money for this step —only instead of using it to pay for recording costs, we’re going to treat it as a “presale" of your music. To do this, we’re going to use a crowdfunding site. There’s a few to choose from, and you’re probably somewhat familiar with them: Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, etc. I personally like Patreon, because the emphasis is on creating consistent work over time, rather than a one-time album.
NOTE: we’re NOT going to release an album in the traditional sense. Albums made sense when they were being pressed on vinyl records and CDs and made to fit a specific timing, but once music moved to the digital realm, they became something of an arbitrary way to group songs together. It makes no sense to hold our recordings for six months while we wait to have enough songs to fill an album if our goal is to generate reliable online income over time. A better strategy — and the one we’re going to use — is to release a steady stream of singles, and group them into albums later. This is the way you maximize your income from music sales online.) Patreon is perfectly set up to do this. You’re going to want to give people the option to choose between giving you $1 per release, and a couple higher tiers that offer bonus rewards — $3 or $10, for example. These bonus rewards could be physical goods, or personalized things, like phone calls. For more, visit their site. I’m not sponsored by them, I’m just telling you what I find works; Patreon was very helpful to me as I was launching Postmodern Jukebox years ago. Once you launch a Patreon, share it all over your social media and your mailing list of friends and family — but be sure to include an *explicit goal* of what you’re trying to make. Don’t just share it and say, “give me money,” but instead, get them to see the vision of what it is you want to create. Don’t worry if it isn’t pop-friendly or mainstream; you’d be surprised at the kind of niche projects that wind up getting a ridiculous amount of crowdfunding. At first, you might not get many pledges overall — maybe you got a grand total of $20 per release. That’s still great. Remember: you already own the recording equipment, so that $20 represents $20 of future guaranteed sales from each release. It’s a start!! STEP 2: CREATE
At this point, you should record your first song. It can be an original. It can be a cover. But you should keep things simple production wise for now, and let your talent be heard; authenticity is going to make people root for you and want to support you. Don’t worry about chasing trends or trying to look “cool” and disinterested — in the end, none of that stuff pays the bills nearly as well as taking what you are passionate about and owning it. Most of us spend far too much time worrying what other people think of us and trying to fit in. Consequently, when we see a performer that isn’t afraid to unabashedly be his /herself, we get a rush of excitement. It is inspiring to see someone that is unencumbered by the pressure to fit in and truly believes in what they do!
If you’re new to recording and mixing, you might need to watch some tutorials or have someone to talk you through the process. Recording and multitracking yourself is fairly simple, but mixing and mastering recordings can be a whole other ballgame.
Fortunately, there are a lot of free tools and plugins that can make the job much easier, and there’s always the option to outsource that part to a friend. As a rule of thumb: the simpler the recording, the easier it is to mix. If you’re a singer, you might want to start with a basic guitar / voice or guitar / piano recording. The goal is simply to produce an authentic recording of yourself that doesn’t hurt people’s ears to listen to.
STEP 3: DISTRIBUTE
Next step: we’re going to find a way to get worldwide distribution and get your new music on YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, etc. You probably already know how to get your music on YouTube, but to get it on the other sites, you need to use something like Distrokid, CD Baby, Tunecore, and others - these are the 21st Century music distributors. Each site varies in terms of their payment structures and terms of service, so look into them and see which one makes sense for you.
This is the one part of the process that is going to involve paying an upfront fee, but it won’t be much, and the idea is to make back a much bigger return on your investment in the form of royalties from downloads and streams. In general, you want to have your music available everywhere, on all platforms. Some folks prefer Apple Music, some folks prefer Google Play, some folks prefer Myspace (maybe). We want to let our fans use their preferred services to listen to us (exception to the rule: when you’re Jay-Z and own your own streaming service). STRAIGHT TALK ON ROYALTIES
Now, a note about royalties - particularly about streaming royalties: They’re horrible. Like, a fraction of a cent horrible. That’s why we’re not wasting our time by spending six months to make an album that fans will stream once or twice. There is, however, one circumstance where streaming royalties AREN’T horrible, and that is when you have lots and lots of releases. When you have lots and lots of releases, you can combine them in different ways to increase both their odds of being discovered and the amount of time each listener spends listening you. You can even make one big playlist that people can use as the soundtrack to their day (or night, as is the case with Vulfpeck’s Spotify-infuriating “Sleepify” album). This way, one listener can be generating royalties for you for hours out of a day, instead of the 40 or 50 minutes that it takes to stream an album once. With enough listeners, this difference adds up.
This is why the major record labels are ok with releasing things on streaming services in the first place; contrary to popular belief, streaming has been great for them. The way to reap some benefits from streaming is to release singles often — maybe as often as once a week, because let’s face it, none of us have much to do right now.
Now, we are still going to release albums, because there are a lot of music fans that still enjoy owning albums, only we are going to wait until we have 12 singles or so and THEN group them into an album. This way, we’re generating royalties from each single from week to week, and then getting a nice little bump in royalties when we release the album.
As we release more singles that get grouped into more albums, we can start building more and bigger playlists on Spotify, and after a year of this, we’ve got a nice, healthy discography of tunes that are all generating passive income.
From my own experience, I kind of stumbled upon the Postmodern Jukebox model of releasing upwards of seven albums in a given calendar year accidently. I was making weekly videos as a YouTuber because they were fun and YouTube rewarded consistency, but at a certain point I started seeing that my monthly royalty statements from the music sites were getting quite large. My consistent uploads of new music had produced a compounding effect, where every new song would help to drive sales of the back catalogue, as well. Today, other successful acts have embraced this strategy — most notably Scary Pockets. If you want to get deeper into the mechanics of this strategy and don’t mind dealing in marketing jargon, look up “content marketing” and the “flywheel model.” Although I’ve spent most of this section discussing streaming, this is really just to show how we’ll deal with the worst case scenario. In reality, many of our fans will choose to digitally download our music — which pays a much higher royalty rate. Streaming has largely supplanted downloading as the preferred medium for music consumption, but that’s not to say that no one downloads music anymore. So while we won’t rely on downloads, we can look at them as a nice bonus that doesn’t cost us any additional work. We’ll take what we can get here!
STEP 4: MARKET
Next, let’s take a look and marketing and publicity. This is a much larger topic of discussion — I go over this stuff in detail in my book, “Outside The Jukebox: How I Turned My Vintage Music Obsession Into My Dream Gig” [shameless plug] — but let me give you a general overview here.
We’re not going to do any paid advertising anywhere; it’s not worth it unless you’re already a major act with money to spend (and if you are: CONGRATS!! Stick to Facebook ads for the most part because those convert the best). Instead, we’re going to engage our existing fan base to get more patrons, downloads, and streams, and hopefully pick up some brand new fans in the process. What does this engagement look like? It could be sharing a picture of something that inspires you. It could be asking your fans to suggest a song they’d like to hear you record. It could be going live to invite the fans into your studio / bedroom / basement to share some of your creative process. Each time, you’re going to let people know where they can find your music or your Patreon — not telling them to buy it or stream it, just merely letting them know it’s something they can do. You might feel like you’re annoying people by promoting your work, but you need to get over that part if you want to generate real income as a musician. Let go of the idea of being a “starving artist!” This is an incredibly dangerous cliche that has brainwashed countless of talented individuals into embracing a life of financially instability — all to satisfy some imagined purity test for art. On the contrary, many of the musicians we uphold as legends were actually incredibly savvy marketers. They made great art, and got paid. By engaging your fans often and honestly, you’re bringing them on your journey as an artist, and in turn, they’re investing in you. If you have 100 die hard fans that are eager to purchase every album, every concert ticket, and every T-shirt you make, there is no question that you can make a living from music online for years to come. Many artists are already at this point, and don’t even realize it!
STEP 5: PERFORM
Lastly, we’re going to touch on a reasonable substitution for touring in these weird, Coronavirus-laden times. However, the “virtual touring” ideas I’m going to present can be done even when physical touring finally resumes, and can offer a nice supplement to your income at any stage in your career. In our current situation, the idea of “touring” now simply means, “monetizing a shared live experience with your fans.” There are a couple of ways to do this online. StageIt is the best game in town for doing virtual concerts that can generate real income from your living room — it’s an amazing and under appreciated resource. Yes, it looks like it’s from 2012 (plot twist: it is) and it isn’t hip and trendy like Instagram, but it is one of the only live stream sites that is set up in a way to truly maximize earnings per stream (Twitch is also good, but much more gamer focused currently). No one makes money on Instagram Live, but lots and lots of artists have made upwards of $10k on a 30 minute stream on StageIt. In addition, offering things like Skype lessons, custom song videos, or virtual meet-and- greets on Zoom are other ideas of ways to supplement your income. These are mostly for your die-hard fans and can be a bit labor-intensive / get weird fast, but they’re still valid sources of “virtual touring” income.
Overall, the process looks like this: Crowdfund, Create, Distribute, Market, Perform, repeat. Of course, consistency is key; that is why you have to be serious about making a living this way. If you stay consistent, you will generate more royalties every time you move through this cycle, and pick up new fans at the time. You’ll become that snowball rolling down the hill…or whatever that metaphor is! And, at a certain point, you’ll have built enough momentum to truly have a profitable online business that you can rely on through difficult times. Now get to work, have some fun, and let’s get through this crazy time together!
-Scott @scottbradlee